We subsidize everything here. If you're important enough that the government might want to influence your behavior it has very little legal authority to demand things. Instead, we encourage behavior with tax breaks, contracts, and grants. Then we add stipulations to said breaks/funding, threatening to revoke them should the business/org in question not comply.

It's kinda like passing laws that require certain behaviors from businesses and such, except also taxpayers get their money funneled into private orgs for the privilege.

"Federal student loans allow [private universities] to raise fees much higher than they otherwise would be able to charge, as do tuition tax credits and Pell Grants. The tax-deductible treatment of private donations helps fund new buildings. … State and local government exemption of facilities from property and sometimes sales taxes provide further assistance. The federal government hands out research grants, with generous (probably overly generous) provision for overhead expenses. Endowments are also advantaged enormously by tax privileges."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2018/04/08/there-...

Research grants. That said, Harvard has the largest university endowment in the world, they'd be just fine operating at their current size off their endowment proceeds effectively forever.

Yeah, I'm not sure what Trump could really do here. Harvard gets < 1B in federal funds every year, mainly for research. Harvard also has a ~50B endowment. Short of sending in the military or confiscating Harvard's private funds, it seems like Harvard can wait him out.

With that said, the current administration appears to have a war on education in general so who knows what ideas they could cook up.